The introduction to the book describes the main claims in Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire. Readers are introduced to major terms in the book, including the military–theatrical complex, military–theatrical experiences, and the national–military phenomenon. The book’s arguments are discussed in the context of France’s evoling geopolitical goals from 1765 to 1794 and with the help of several critical approaches, including Theater and Performance Studies, Gender Studies, and the cultural history of the French military. The end of the Introduction lays out the structure of the book and posits several key questions that the study hopes to answer.

Chapter 2 brings to light a dozen desertion-themed plays and operas that followed in the wake of Le Siège de Calais. These works, which were performed during the Old Regime’s twilight, are analyzed alongside recent scholarship on military and early modern masculinities to tease out the theatricalization of an emerging martial culture that drew on emotional brotherhood and feminine exclusion. This chapter includes a comparative analysis of two versions of one play, Le Déserteur, a sentimental anti-war drame by Louis-Sébastien Mercier and an alternative version of the play that was dramaturgically “militarized” by Joseph Patrat for soldiers and sailors at the navy’s theater in Brest (Le Théâtre de la Marine). A close reading of variants, edits, and both textual and cultural manipulation presents war drama as a site of conflict in a larger intellectual battle where different factions in French society argued about reform cultures inside military and theatrical circles.

This chapter describes theatrical responses to France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), often described by historians as the first global war. This is achieved through a close reading of the dramatic text and performance history of Pierre-Laurent de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais (1765), which was pitched by its author as France’s “first national tragedy” and used by government officials to rally French subjects around their country and their army. The play was vital in creating through theater a new relationship between French subjects and the nation’s armed conflicts. De Belloy’s success was predicated on his manipulation of new forms of “bourgeois” and “sentimental” drama, and the play went on to inspire more soldier plays and war dramas. The chapter concludes with an examination of the tragedy’s reverberations throughout the French empire by way of parodies and public readings of Le Siège de Calais in fairground theaters and military garrisons.